Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [32]
The colonists who settled in America brought with them the English justice system, including hanging practices. As in England, the American theater of execution was strictly scripted: prayers in the jail cell, a formal procession through the streets to the gallows, a confession by the condemned, more prayers, and, finally, the drop. By taking a man's life, the magistrates demonstrated the power of the state, while the ministers gave divine sanction to the proceedings. The prisoner, by confessing, assured the authorities and the audience that the execution was just.5
The members of the crowd played the most important role, because the ceremony was performed for their benefit. Watching a hanging was considered a wholesome activity, even for women and children. In their execution sermons, ministers described the condemned not as a moral monster, utterly unlike the spectators, but as a common sinner, exactly like them. All people bore the stain of original sin; all were guilty of lust and anger—the man on the scaffold had just traveled a bit farther down the well-trodden path of iniquity. As they watched the execution, citizens faced the burden of sinfulness that was the fate of all men. The crime of murder destroyed families, sowed distrust among neighbors, and ripped communities apart; the execution ceremony brought them together again. A public hanging was intended to serve as a civic ritual of retribution and reconciliation.6
William Hogarth's The Idle 'Prentice Executed at Tyburn, 1747. Riotous crowds at public hangings were common in England and America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
ON AUGUST 24, 1827, a man named Jesse Strang was hanged in Albany, New York, for the murder of his lover's husband. On the morning of the execution, the Reverend Lacey, an Episcopal minister, prayed with Strang in his cell for several hours. At precisely one o'clock, the condemned was ushered out of the prison. He wore black gloves, a long white shroud trimmed in black, and a white cap, also trimmed in black—traditional garb for the gallows. The minister walked on one side of Strang, the sheriff on the other. The jailer and other civil officials joined the procession, which was led by two black horses drawing a wagon that bore an empty coffin. The Albany Republican Military provided an escort.7
The militia escort was not a formality. Steamboats and ferries arriving in Albany were swarmed with passengers, and the roads into the city were choked with carriages and farm wagons. Visitors thronged the streets and sidewalks, bringing normal business to a halt. With great difficulty the militiamen managed to part the crowds to allow the procession to make its way to the execution site. The gallows had been constructed next to a bend in the Ruttenkill, a small river about a quarter mile from the state capitol building. From the valley floor steep hills rose abruptly on three sides, forming a natural amphitheater, and more than 30,000 people crowded the hills. Earlier in the day, when the crowds first started to swell, thirteen companies of volunteer militia had marched to the execution site and formed themselves three deep in a large circle, keeping the spectators from surging toward the scaffold.
A little before half past one the circle of soldiers parted to allow entry to the hearse, the civil and religious officials, and the condemned man. Strang mounted the steps to the gallows, and the sheriff invited him to address the crowd. In a voice loud enough to reach the hilltops, Strang expressed sorrow for his crimes and hope that his death might atone for his sins. He urged those present to "reflect upon the effects of sin and lust" and avoid his terrible fate. The sheriff granted the condemned man another hour of prayer to make his peace with God, but Strang said he was ready to die. Reverend Lacey read the burial service of the Episcopal Church: "In the midst of life we are in death: Of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord, who